


only the good die young (the rest of us have work on monday)

by Ahavaa



Series: see you on monday [1]
Category: Daredevil (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, hollywood-style depiction of grief probably, the mcu is a terrifying place to live
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-31
Updated: 2015-05-31
Packaged: 2018-04-02 06:07:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4049092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ahavaa/pseuds/Ahavaa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They never actually found the body.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. everyone has to do it someday

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, this started out as a fill for a prompt, and then it just - turned into straight up sad pathetic speculating about that one universe where Matt died young. 
> 
> So.

They never actually found a body. 

The first couple of months he and Karen wound up being worse for each other, in the long run, because they both knew how incredible Matt was. They'd meet to drink (not at Josie's, never at Josie's) and a beer or a shot too far and Karen would start talking about the time she saw Matt take down five armed men with a piece of chain. Foggy would remember a time when he'd come to Matt's apartment and Matt had looked half-dead, sure, three-quarters dead, but he'd always come back. 

Tenacious little fucker, Karen would say. 

Spend too much time telling stories like that, and it's easy to keep hoping. 

Iron Man, Foggy said: everyone thought he was dead for weeks. He was fine. 

Yeah, Karen said. Didn't the NYT publish that article, the one, he crawled out of the desert half-dead? 

(That was awful, the two of them sitting in some pricey bar with clean glasses, half-drunk, and thinking _if Iron Man got a miracle, why not Matt?_ )

Claire was the one who broke that cycle, eventually, because Foggy invited her for drinks after nine weeks, give or take. 

She listened to them talking, and turned her beer between her palms, staring at the table most of the night. Finally, she'd looked up - sober, and tired - and asked _why are you talking like he's still alive?_

 

**

 

Matt didn't have family. 

There wasn't a funeral. This is what they did instead: they went to his place and he and Karen hunted down everything that looked vaguely suspicious. 

(We should keep it, just in case, Foggy had said, angry because it was so dumb. They have storage lockers. 

Yeah, Karen had said. We should. 

Neither of them had cried; Foggy knew that he was too tired to squeeze out any more tears. It had seemed important to say it, out loud, to say that they should wait longer. 

There hadn't been money for it, of course. But they should've.) 

They'd bundled Matt's life into black plastic trash bags: bloodstained clothing, bloodstained escrima sticks, knives and boots and gloves, Matt's stash of antibiotics and painkillers, body armor, all of it definitely pieces from crime scenes. What did anyone in this shitheap of a city do with vital evidence in criminal cases? They'd thrown the bags, one at a time, into the river. It almost certainly didn't matter: it still felt like helping Matt's murderer get away with their crime. 

Foggy broke Matt's lease. 

They kept a few of his clients. They let others go. 

 

**

 

Fisk had showed up at the office about a year after Matt had disappeared for good. 

Six months ago, Foggy thought, we would've been up in his face. Someone would've thrown a punch. Someone would've shouted. 

Matt made doing shit like that seem reasonable: he ran around with horns stapled to the hood of his superhero costume, for fuck's sake. 

Now, though? Now Fisk stood there, big and awkward and ungainly, and Karen sat at her desk, shoulders slumped in dull resentment, and Foggy stood between them, thinking: _oh, but I am tired._

"I wanted to - we have never been friends," Fisk said, "but I wanted to offer my sympathy."

Nobody said anything. He knew; oh, of course he'd known. How stupid of them, looking back, it had been, to assume he didn't know. 

"I understand loss," he'd continued, awkwardly, and Foggy had suddenly had enough of it. If he understood loss, he wouldn't have _been here,_ in their space, talking like he had the right to say anything. 

But maybe he did: maybe he'd waited just long enough for the improbable, primary-colored enthusiasm that Matt had given them to fade out. Maybe he knew that a month ago, Karen would've punched him and Foggy would've punched him, but now - now that seemed pointless. A little vulgar, even. 

"Karen," he'd said, "I need you in my office," which sure, it just meant leaving the front lobby and closing the door - Fisk could see them through the window. It was disrespectful, maybe they were about to get killed for disrespecting a mob boss, but he couldn't. Karen followed him and stood with her back to the door. She wasn't crying. 

"Is he still there," she asked. 

"Yeah," Foggy said. "No. He's leaving, he's walking out." 

He'd left a check. 

It would've been nice to be able to refuse the money. Tear it up, burn it, something. 

They were three months behind on the rent for the office space, though, and only had paying clients half the time. 

 

**

 

Foggy tried to file a restraining order, but it felt like going through the motions. Brett had visited him at home, a couple days after he filed the paperwork: "Is this a joke? You have no compelling reason to file this: if there's a real reason, Nelson, you need to tell me. We'll keep it private, but I need to know how hard to push for you."

He'd thought about it for a minute. 

"Or sit there," Brett had said. "Fuck if I care." 

"Get a beer," Foggy had said. "No compelling reason, I just - "

"You never lied to me before," Brett said. "You're in trouble, fine, we'll fix it - "

"No," Foggy had said. "It doesn't matter, now." 

 

**

 

A kid showed up at Foggy's apartment, several months later. He was skinny, and tired, and he had a bruise on his cheekbone and a cut near his eye socket, and he walked with the familiar kind of limp that made Foggy's head hurt. 

"I'm not supposed to know you," he'd said. "We have a friend, though. I haven't seen him for a while." 

"No," Foggy had said. "Nobody has." 

The kid had looked sick, and then he'd looked - tired, the way Foggy felt tired. "Should I let - people know?"

"Do what you want," Foggy had told him. He'd wanted to say _and leave us alone_ , but that had been too cruel: he'd invited the kid in for coffee instead. Forced him to play HALO for an hour or so, fed him a couple of leftover burritos, given him his card. 

Things were grey, and tired, for a few years after that. Foggy felt grey and tired. Karen looked jumpy, and exhausted. Beautiful, of course. But exhausted. 

He felt worn to the bone. 

It sounded like horseshit when people suggested that you got over grief. It felt like a well: after a while, Foggy started to know where the edges of it were, and after some years, he felt like it was a well with a cover over it. He knew where it was; he knew where the dangerous edge was, but it had been covered, and it no longer leaked into the whole of his life, flavoring every thought and action with _but matt._

Ten years after Matt disappeared, three years after Karen had married her wife, Foggy took her out. It wasn't the anniversary - not that they had an anniversary, or a date, as such - the police report had been filed April 17th, but that meant almost nothing. It was in the spring. Foggy drank too much. 

"I gotta know," he'd said. "I shouldn't ask but I gotta know. Did you regret it, or did it make it better? Knowing that you had him before he -"

Karen had put down her wineglass, and stared into her salad, hands folded with her elbows on the table. She didn't look at him when she said "you had him too," which should have been the warning that Foggy needed. He'd missed it. Hadn't been paying attention. 

"Not the way you did," he'd said, and known from the way her shoulders went straight up to her ears that he'd made a mistake. 

"No," she'd said. "Of course it didn't make it better." And then she'd looked him straight in the eye and said "you knew him for longer than I did, you had more years, did that make it better?"

"OK, point," he'd said. "I'm an ass and I love you. I just -"

"I _know_ ," Karen said. "I know that."

She'd avoided him for a few weeks after that. Never really abandoned him, but avoided being alone with him, and when she finally invited him to dinner, they didn't talk about Matt. It felt too much like poking a bruise. 

Which made his life sound hard and grey, didn't it? 

It wasn't. 

Hard, yeah, always hard, but sometimes he made it harder because he thought that's what Matt would've done. 

Grey? No. 

They were living in an age of mutations and superpowers and alien invasions: not even dirt poor slums like Hell's Kitchen could really escape all that. 

Yeah. He and Karen were probably the only people who knew that the people who killed Matt Murdock were running free in Hell's Kitchen, but they weren't the only people who cared about the city. Foggy spent years of his life on fucking rental agreements. Wound up accidentally specializing in worker's comp cases, because it was a brave new world they were living in, and it seemed like every six months somebody got exposed to some new mutagenic or carcinogenic. 

Parker - the kid who'd asked about their friend - knew some people who knew some people, at the Bugle. Karen got a job. 

He wound up working Helmer V. Trask in '24: Helmer Industries was the first company to sue after Vienna Trask, a factory worker exposed to a mutagenic chemical, developed superstrength, quit her job, and started running around in a costume. They'd sued her for copyright violation and releasing proprietary information and if Karen hadn't been writing an editorial every week, Foggy was pretty sure they would've tried to label her blood as company information and put a gag order on her doctor. 

Tony Stark went nuts and almost took over the city: Tony Stark got better and saved the world. The only people who took this in stride were the tabloids, honestly, and that said a lot about the world. 

Peter Parker came to visit, and because he was finally legal, Foggy fed him beer until he started slurring, crawled up the wall a little, hung upside down from the ceiling, loose and relaxed while he kicked Foggy's ass at Call of Duty. It was all fine until he asked Foggy "how old. Um. How old was Matt, when he."

Which was really a sign of how much of a lightweight Parker was, because they didn't use Matt's name. 

And Foggy looked at Parker, barely twenty-four in human years, thirty or forty in relative years because he'd been putting the costume on since he was seventeen, and he didn't have it in him to give the kid the lecture he deserved. "Thirty-one, Pete." 

And Pete said, "how much does a guy like you charge a guy like me? I think - I know I should have a will."

He came to the office a couple weeks later. They made graveyard jokes until halfway through, when it stopped being funny (Matt isn't buried anywhere, Foggy had thought, suddenly, surprised all over again by how it could hurt.) and asked Peter to stop. 

It'd be nice to think that Foggy only had one love in his life, but he got older, and it - well. Tragic one-sided love was well and good in your twenties, maybe, but then you got into your thirties, and then your forties. It sounded unkind to think of it as growing up, to look back on Matt, running around with fucking horns on his head punching people in the face and think _jesus, we were kids,_ but - Matt had barely made it to thirty-one. 

Rosa was thirty-seven when he met her. She was heading the discrimination case against the city that argued St. Patrick's orphanage - which everyone knew was where the mutant and non-human kids got sent - was deliberately underfunded and understaffed, and she invited him to dinner. 

(It was enough to make him feel guilty, because Rosa was the kind of lawyer he'd thought Matt was, before he found out about the extracurriculars. Earnest. By the book. He'd call it naive, but no, she really was that principled. Honest.) 

They didn't have kids, but they wound up with a fucking dog, and they were broke as shit ninety percent of the time. Half of Foggy's clients paid in promises to reshingle the roof, and half of Rosa's clients were homeless kids with ridiculous mutations like scales or three eyelids, so they were never going to be rich, and they were never going to be famous, but that was all right. Sometimes they won, and that was good, and sometimes they lost, and that was bad, and sometimes Rosa had to sleep in the guest bedroom because she got sad, and sometimes he had nightmares, but it was good. 

They figured out a way to set up a nesting box in their back patio after someone paid Foggy in chickens. He paid taxes: he knew he had finally reached adulthood, after a fashion, when he started having to pay taxes instead of anticipating a tax return. He felt weirdly adult, and then he felt confused, and Rosa laughed at him a lot. 

"We can borrow my cousin's baby next year, for taxes," she'd said: "then the government will send us money again." 

"No thanks," Foggy had said, "taxes are where they get you, I'm still too pretty to go to jail -" and remembered Matt, criminally young, telling him and Karen to be careful, telling them to follow the money. He couldn't remember the man's name: they'd been going after Wilson Fisk, who was still alive, and still wealthy, and still influential in the city. 

Couldn't be perfect, right?


	2. A SIDE: only remember me, you understand

_but honestly, it ended like this_

 

You get sad in the spring, Rosa said, a couple of years after they'd been married. 

Yeah, Foggy had said. 

Whenever you're ready, she'd said, watching him, careful and a little wary. 

 

**

 

He had a reoccurring nightmare where - oh, something happened. Sometimes it was cancer, sometimes it was a car, sometimes it was a guy with a gun yelling about how Foggy's friend had ruined his life ten years ago - but however it happened, he died. 

They say if you die in your dreams, you wake up: boom, it's over. 

This nightmare, though, Foggy died, and he woke up in some afterlife: pastel, well-lit, clean, good smelling. 

Matt was always there. 

Sometimes in the Daredevil costume, cowl pushed back, and sometimes in his cheap Going to Court suit. Sometimes he could see Foggy, sometimes he was still blind: sometimes Foggy could talk to him. Once, terribly, he'd dreamed that he'd died and gotten to wherever Matt was. Matt had been blind, but so pleased to see him, laughing, talking to Foggy, and Foggy tried to say "yo, Matty," but - he opened his mouth and no sound came out, no matter how hard he tried. Matt had gotten sad, in that nightmare, finally gotten to repeating "sorry, sorry, please talk to me, i'm _sorry_ , foggy" and - 

Rosa had woken Foggy up from that one. 

He'd gone down to the kitchen to make a cup of cocoa: she'd followed him down. "Want me to sit with you?" she'd asked, because when she got sad she wanted him to leave her alone, she wanted to listen to music and lie with Casanova, and he'd learned how prickly she could be when he interrupted that. 

"Yeah," Foggy had said. 

She'd held his hand, and they'd sat in their tiny kitchen until it was time to get ready to go to work. 

 

**

 

One summer, the Avengers wound up evacuating everyone on Foggy's office block. No one could see a threat - it seemed like a totally normal office block, but with Captain America and Iron Man shouting things to each other and the two Hawkeyes warily pointing their bows at things that looked like normal fire hydrants from way up top on the roofs. 

"Poison gas," Eric from two offices down said, wisely. "Anthrax, maybe."

"Nanobots," Christi said. (She was twenty-three and working on solar-powered nanobots: the trick is getting them to breed, she'd explained to Foggy, one day they both got stuck in the elevator.) 

Whatever they were looking for, they didn't find, but the police closed off three city blocks for a bunch of besuited young men and women carrying what looked like Geiger counters and a distressing amount of guns to knock down doors. 

Foggy stayed with five or six other people, to watch, for a couple of hours, and then when it became clear that the excitement was over, they split an uber, because the false alarm had shut down the subway for the sixth time that month. 

 

**

 

Foggy found out what the fuss had been about when he got home that night, and Rosa said "hey, baby, don't get mad."

There'd been a kid, maybe eleven or twelve, sitting at the table, bruised up face. Little horns growing out of her forehead, shaggy goat-like ears. 

An old man stood in the corner of the kitchen, lurking, and he looked enough like Rosa that at first Foggy had assumed he was family, that this was just a sad, private business. But then the guy had said "This has better not be a trick," and Foggy recognized the voice, slotted the pieces together and realized that Erik Lehnsherr was standing in his kitchen with a mutant kid. 

"We're gonna wind up on a watch list," he'd told Rosa, and she'd bitten her lip and nodded towards the kid, ignoring the megalomaniac in the corner. 

"She needs somewhere to stay."

Casanova was growling on the patio outside: he clearly didn't like Lehnsherr. Foggy didn't blame him. 

"OK," he'd said, and they'd figured it out. The international terrorist (in their kitchen! goddamnit!) had barely threatened them more than three or four times, and stopped completely when Foggy mentioned how every threat he made made little horned Jenny cry more. 

Rosa had apologized a lot, after they'd gotten Jenny settled, because Lehnsherr had known about her from her more famous cases. "I'm sorry for bringing that into the house," she'd said, and Foggy had told her not to think about it. (He'd felt shitty, when he'd said it, and like a liar, even though he wasn't lying to her. It was just - it didn't matter, she didn't need to know. That part of his life was long gone and over with.) 

 

**

 

Karen died. 

She had a heart attack, in the fall, and she died. 

Foggy went to the funeral, and listened to people saying things about her - that she had been brave, and determined, and dedicated to the truth. 

He got hit with a ugly, selfish wave of _loneliness_ about half way through the service. Threw up in the bathroom. Left early; he didn't really deserve to be there. They'd lost touch, as they'd grown older: that crystalline feeling of youth and adventure, of the way they were changing the world, had faded. Before she died, he'd seen her once a month or so, but - it hadn't been the same. 

Two weeks later he visited her grave

"Hey," he'd said, to the bouquet leaning against the new stone, sure that nobody but the dead could hear him through his coat and scarf and mittens. "I'm sorry I left, I just - " but he couldn't think of how to finish the sentence. "I guess I keep missing these things." It was cold, and the wind hit him in the face, stinging his eyes and nose. "Take care of each other," he said. And then felt stupid, and sentimental: Matt had been the one who believed in some kind of afterlife, but Karen hadn't, not ever, really, and Foggy - couldn't really believe that they'd get that lucky. 

 

**

 

Nothing prompted it, nothing that he could tell: one day, the spring he turned fifty-six, he woke up from a garden-variety nightmare, went to work, spent the day failing to get anywhere in a custody dispute between the state and a mutant family, filed the paperwork, didn't get in a fight on the subway on his way home. They ate dinner, they talked about Rosa's new fruit trees, which were surprisingly robust for potted trees that stayed in the living room, they walked Casanova. 

Afterwards, sitting at the kitchen table, while he drank a beer and Rosa slowly smoked a narrow little joint, he'd said it. Finally, and too soon, in the quiet warm dark of the summer evening, he'd said: "I never told you about my friend Matt from law school." 

Rosa'd let out a cloud of sweet, bitter smoke. "He's not here anymore, is he?" she'd asked. 

"No," Foggy said. It felt like nothing at all, and it felt like finally coming up for air after being underwater for too long, when he said "he died, a long time ago, in Hell's Kitchen."

Rosa wrapped her cold fingers around his, kissed his hand. 

"Tell me about him," she said. 

Foggy did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title from Christina Rossetti's "Remember Me." 
> 
> because fuck, let's all just be sad together. 
> 
> (no, honestly, this is the one that had least to do with the actual prompt, and most to do with the idea that in this AU, foggy grows up. matt doesn't. what do you do when your best friend dies, and you can't grieve properly because that best friend is a secret masked vigilante?)


End file.
